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As he promised, Mohammad was at the front of our Kashgar hotel at 9am on Monday to pick us up to begin our trip along the Karakoram Highway to Tashkurgan, the last sizeable Chinese town before the Pakistan border. First stop after about an hour was the small town of Upal which holds its own weekly market every Monday. This is a smaller, local affair which concentrates on meat, vegetables and fruit. Everything was very fresh, and the walk down butchers’ row was interesting but not for the squeamish. From the cow, goat and sheep's heads and other materials littering the ground, it appeared that the killing hadn't been long finished and the butchers were now hard at work, expertly cutting up the carcasses. We bought some fruit, and hot bread rolls direct from a stone oven.
For the next few hours we drove along the stunning Karakoram Highway which must be one of the most spectacular roads in the world. It has everything – canyons, plateaus, glaciers, snow-capped mountains of 25,000 feet towering over the road, grasslands, and different peoples and settlements. We made many stops to take photos of the different landforms and life along the highway. At one small lake, a perfect reflection of the surrounding multi-coloured landforms created a picture that seemed to belong more in a modern art gallery than in nature. We came across many wild camels, and herds of yaks, sheep and goats tended by Tajik and Kyrgy nomads. Tajik yurts dotted the grasslands and more substantial human adobe mud-brick settlements were located now and then along the highway.
We stopped to visit a Kyrgy family and had tea in their yurt, and the following day on the way back we were invited to have a look inside a Tajik family's adobe house. In both cases we paid them well for the photos they allowed us to take. At one settlement we saw two women cooking bread in an iron pot in a cow dung fire and we offered them a high price for one of their loaves; an offer they happily accepted. Despite the stunning physical beauty of the area, the people are financially very poor and live their lives with the most basic of material supports.
In Tashkurgan we stayed at the Pamir Hotel before making the return journey to Kashgar the following day. Because there's so much variety on the Karakoram Highway we enjoyed the return journey as much as we had the outward leg. At one point on the way back we took a short detour to visit the border with Kazakhstan. Here there was a long row of trucks waiting to complete the necessary documentation to allow them to cross the border. At Tashkurgan we were 70km from the border with Afghanistan and about 200km from the border with Pakistan. We were thinking of visiting the latter but this was not possible as the road forward from Tashkurgan has been shut by the Chinese authorities until further notice. It was a fantastic two days. Mohammad was a very safe driver and he drove slowly so we could enjoy the view rather than continually have to worry about whether the next bend might be our last. He also played relaxing Uighur music in his taxi which added a lot of atmosphere to the journey.
